Anim8or Community

For the wire I'd suggest using an N-gon, then extruding it along a curved path.

Yes, I would definately go the route RudySchneider pointed out for this animation.  Even if you could get the bones to animate, it's so much easier with the parenting and movement keys.

I don't think Anim8or exports directly to the .x format, but there's a number of free or cheap programs out there that can bridge the gap for you.

I did some modding a while back on a game which used .x files.  I exported the file from Anim8or as a .OBJ, opened that with Ultimate Unwrap ($20), then exported from there as an .x file.

My own recommendation would be DivX.  It was $20 if I recall correctly, but totally worth it.  I was having nothing but trouble with Indeo and the various others, both in terms of file size and crashes while rendering, Divx has been smooth as silk, extremely efficient in terms of file size, and never crashes.

Looks pretty good.  There were so many different styles of morningstar you can pretty much take your liberty with the amount and length of spikes, however I'd say the handle is too short. 

As floyd said, turn anitaliasing on for your renders for a much cleaner image without the "jaggies'.

Thanks guys. 

Kahlua17:  I forgot to grab some wireframes for you today, I'll post some up tomorrow.  I actually did start a few pieces, like part of the nacelle, the lower bridge section, and the torpedo bay as a subdivide object to get the rounding on the edges, then coverted them to meshes.  For the saucer section it was just a matter of extruding the top and bottom faces and scaling that face down a bit.  I'll also post up the basic pattern I came up with to use for the "aztec"-ing.  Basically the process was creating a two-color square pattern by eyeballing the original pattern, then resizing it so it was three times (I think three) longer than it was wide, flood filling the image with the tile, then applying the distortion effect "polar coordinates" to make it round.  I'll show you what I mean in a forthcoming post.

Ensoniq, thanks for the advice.  I went back and checked it on the other model.  All faces were flipped the right way, but when I select them all some are brighter yellow than others, I think there must be some distortion in there some how, some of the points must have gotten moved just a bit.  I'll go back and fix or rebuild that one later.  I will say one oddity I am getting here with this model is if I load the bump map texture and apply it, it works fine - until I save and re-load the file, then it's doing much the same thing as the other model did.  If I then delete that texture and re-load it, it's fine again.  Maybe Anim8or is anti-Trekkie. :p

5lider: Yes indeed, Ketzer does some amazing work and if I'm not mistaken all of his stuff is scratchbuilt.  That's incredible if you ask me, taking sheets of styrene and melting/sculpting them into studio-quality models.  Unbelievable.  I referred to his site quite a bit for my Millennium Falcon model as well.

Here's some shots of the partially completed secondary hull, partially completed "neck" and torpedo bay (although I might redo that), and partially completed bridge section.

Thanks guys.

The following is the beginning of the build of the saucer section.  The top part is textured.

I wasn't planning on doing any serious texturing until after the build of the model was done, but as I was looking around at www.starshipmodeler.com for a couple good angles on the bridge section, I stumbled upon an article about the actual hull plate patterns they used when building the first 8' model for the Motion Picture.  The guy provided shots of the patterns used on the ships for other modelers to use as a template for airbrushing (starshipmodeller.com deals in actual real-world models, not CG stuff).

I did my best to duplicate the pattern for my model here, and am rather pleased with how it came out.  The bump map seems to be functioning properly, in my Original Series model it never worked right and I couldn't figure out why - it was like inverted in places and in some areas seemed to fade out.

So anyway, here's the basic saucer section shape with the new pattern (The NCC-1701 and USS Enterprise are the wrong size, I know.  That part's just a cut and paste from my other model to see how it would look):